Hemant Mehta is the founder and editor of FriendlyAtheist.com, a YouTube creator, and podcast co-host. He is a former National Board Certified math teacher in the suburbs of Chicago. He has appeared on CNN and FOX News and served on the board of directors for Foundation Beyond Belief and the Secular Student Alliance. He has written multiple books, including I Sold My Soul on eBay and The Young Atheist's Survival Guide. He also edited the book Queer Disbelief.
As I posted a couple of days ago, Kentucky recently passed House Bill 279, allowing for discrimination in the workplace, housing, and even public facilities if the justification involves “sincerely held religious beliefs.” Governor Steve Beshear vetoed the bill, but the state’s other elected official had the numbers to override the veto. So discrimination against gays, lesbians, atheists, Muslims, and everyone else who doesn’t believe what the Christian majority does is about to become commonplace in the state. As tragic as that is, I have to appreciate this letter from a local Unitarian pastor in response to the bill: [Click headline for more…] Read more
This is a guest post by Marcus Mann. Marcus is a graduate student in Religion at Duke University. He studies contemporary atheist and secular humanist social movements and has contributed to the blog NonProphet Status. You can follow him on Twitter at @mannmarcus. *** Near the end of his book Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious, Chris Stedman urges us, the readers, “to step boldly and defiantly across dividing lines of religious and nonreligious identity and share our experiences in hope that we might build understanding through relationships of commitment and cooperation.” Rather than write a review for this important and affective book or take part in the controversy that it has engendered, I want to take this cue from Stedman and share a bit of my own story and of how both atheism and religious pluralism became values central to my worldview. In doing so, I hope to contribute in some small way to the broader exercise of building the kind of understanding Stedman writes about. [Click on headline for more…] Read more
This is Harun Yahya (a.k.a. Adnan Oktar) in the introduction to his book Atlas of Creation: Volume 1: Some 150 years ago, the British naturalist Charles Darwin proposed a theory based on various observations made during his travels, but which could not be supported by any subsequent scientific findings. In essence, his theory of evolution consisted of various scenarios, assumptions and conjectures that Darwin dreamed up in his own imagination. [Click headline for more…] Read more